"Flash Fiction" by James and Denise Thomas

This was the required reading book for my Junior Creative Writing class in college.  I never finished reading it then, and didn't find the time to do it in the following 13 years or so... until now.  All of the stories are 750 words or less.  It has become a kind of a fad in the last decade for notable magazines to put very short word limits on accepted fiction work, like 1200 words, or 900 words or even 750 words.  I never believed that one could express proper emotion and build proper characters in such short space.  The only thing you could do in such short space is write "mood pieces", a bit in Rimbaud style, a bit like emotional safety valve going off in a more-or-less connected and relevant emotional rambling.  For the most, it is true of the stories in this book.  These are the kind of fiction stories one might find inside general interest magazines or tabloids.  Not too much time investment, but still a certain payoff for reading them.  Writing short-short fiction requires meticulous planning - or none at all. It depends.

There are some definite gems in this collection.  Some of my favorites are:  232-9979, Subtotals, How to touch a bleeding dog and Deportation at Breakfast.  Still, it is difficult to get emotionally involved and dis-involved (in order to move to the next story, the next involvement) in only 750 words.  A writer can write for a certain word length (comics authors do it all the time, and the outcome is good), but that does not give the writer the freedom to let the imagination flow, there are limits, artificial ones that stifle and smother.  That is not the way.  If a writer expresses a full emotion or idea and the result happens to be under 750 words (very unlikely) then so be it, but the word limit should never be one of the starting parameters of a work of art.  This book can be read over many days, and that is probably the way to do it, but in that way it is easy to forget it it, and remember it 10 years later.  You can also read it in one day, a few hours, but then it results in a jumble of images and emotions in your head.  I am not sure which is worse.